Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Literary and Professional Friendships: The Snows of Yesteryear

“There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.” ― P.G. Wodehouse

This is the second in a series of reflections on friendship that I shared with my men’s group known as “Brothers on a Journey” that meets at All Saints Episcopal Church every Monday night.  You can read the others at:
A lot of my friendships in college and grad school centered on my dream of becoming


a writer and a poet. In 1967, I went to Boston University after a checkered high school career. I took classes in Greek at Princeton University and was editor of Princeton High School’s literary magazine, and I had the distinction of being the first student busted for pot. One of my friends at this time was Arkie Kempton, son of the journalist Murray Kempton. We shared a passion for Motown music as well as for pot.  Arkie was also an excellent writer who wrote a book with the cool title: Boogaloo: the Quintessence of American Popular Music.  When I got to Boston, I started hanging out with Arkie and his friend Roy Campanella, Jr, son of the baseball player. In a darkened Harvard dorm room we smoked hashish and listened to bebop jazz and I became a devotee of Charlie Parker. I was also using acid on a regular basis and my brain got so fried that I checked into Mass Mental to detox, much to the dismay of my parents. When I was released, I began seeing a therapist but my confidence in my sanity was shaken for many years. This stint in mental institution would help me later when I became a student of a poet whose career started in a mental institution.
One of my best friends in college was a rock musician named Jeff Pitcher, a long-haired bass player from New Jersey with a lisp and a hip way of speaking that expanded my vocabulary. We roomed together for year. In this kaleidoscopic world of sex, drugs and rock and roll, my interest in classics faded, but my dream of becoming a writer intensified. Living in the slums, hanging out with street people and artists, seemed fodder for writing the great American novel or poem I felt I was destined to write. In my shabby apartment on Symphony Road, not far from Symphony Hall, I wrote poems influenced by dead poet like Rimbaud and Ezra Pound, trying to make gems out of broken wine bottles.
In my junior year, I had was given the chance to realize my dream of becoming a poet when I was accepted to the poetry workshop of Anne Sexton. There I made friends with some of the most gifted neurotics in New England, and my life was never the same.
Two of the most memorable members of Anne’s workshop were Suzanne Berger and Ellen Bass, both very different. I became more or less friends with both of them. Ellen was a feminist poet who went on to write many books like “I’m Not Your Laughing Daughter” and “No More Masks.” While I was in grad school, I invited Ellen to give a poetry reading at Rutgers. Suzanne wrote intense, personal, imagistic poetry very much in the spirit of our teacher Anne Sexton.  I haven’t seen Suzanne since college but I’ve learned that she has been taking part in annual memorials for Anne at Forsyth Chapel in the cemetery where Anne was buried. A newspaper account from 2006 quotes Suzanne as saying:  
"Anne wrote very stimulating poetry. She was very vibrant and very serious inside the classroom. She launched a lot of poets.”
That’s very true. Despite or maybe because of  Anne’s brilliant poetry, and crazy life, she encouraged a lot of us to try our wings as poets. In fact, the last time I saw Anne, I told her I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my life. “Why not become a poet?” she said, smiling at me with her large, intense eyes. I will always cherish these words of encouragement. For a couple of years, I tried being a poet. Now I have settled for simply letting poems come to me like butterflies that arrive unexpectedly in my garden.
I don’t know what happened to all the amazing poets that I met during this two-year period. We had beautiful, intense friendships but like fireworks that shoot across the sky, they didn’t last.  I’ve been thinking of a poem by the French poet Francois Villon who wrote a famous ballade about beautiful women, all of whom have melted away, like snow. Ou sont les neiges d’antan? Where are the snows of yesterday? I sometimes wonder: Where are the friends of yesterday? It would be wonderful to have a reunion someday, but how this will happen, I have no idea. The only poet from that period I still am in touch with is Henry Stimpson, who co-edited Boston University’s literary magazine with me. He started a PR business but still writes and publishes an occasional poem. We’ve stayed friends and occasionally correspond via Facebook. When I was working on my novel set in Boston, we had dinner together at Legal Seafood. I like him better now than when I knew him in college. He seemed dull back then, compared with the stellar poets who were in Sexton’s workshop. Now Henry seems like what he actually is: a nice guy with a flair for writing clever verses.
After college, my father died and I went on the road, following the example of Jack Kerouac, although I paid for my train fare. I took the Trans-Canadian Railroad across Canada, stopping off in various cities along the way. I ended up in Gastown, the Greenwich Village of Vancouver, and met a lot of interesting artist types while writing for underground newspapers. One of them, Jim Cooper, became a lifelong friend. Jim was raised Mormon, but he abandoned his faith and became an artist. He was fascinated with the I Ching and composed illustrations for it. He presided over a household full of artists, hippies and spiritual seekers where I lived on and off for a year. The year I spent in Vancouver was one of the happiest of my life. It was year when I connected with God and felt as if God were as real as an intimate Friend. I haven’t always been faithful to this divine friendship, I have been neglectful and preoccupied with lesser things, but my Friend has never forsaken me and I am grateful that He is and always will be at the center of my life.
Jim and I collaborated on various spiritually based art projects before I left to go back to Princeton. Over the years Jim and I stayed in touch off and on, but the really precious moment in our friendship happened five years ago. I got word from him through Facebook that he had cancer and was utterly alone and friendless. His divorced wife and child had rejected him completely. He was living on welfare and eking out a living with occasional art projects. I called him and we talked and renewed our friendship. I also prayed for him. Then something amazing happened. He found that he had fathered a daughter that he knew nothing about because the young woman he impregnated was a Mormon and her family prevented her from having anything to do with the father of her child. She kept this secret and only in the last few years did the daughter realize who her real father was. She reached out to Jim and they met for the first time on Easter Sunday five years ago. It was an incredible experience for both of them. In fact, it was nothing short of a miracle.
I was glad to be Jim’s friend during this period and felt the presence of the Spirit as he joyfully shared his story with me. He seems to be doing much better with his life since connecting with his long lost daughter.  
In 1974, after spending time in Canada and going to Greece, I returned to Princeton to be with my widowed mother and sister and figure out what I was going to do with my life. I did odd jobs but found nothing satisfying until I started substitute teaching at an all-black inner city school in Trenton, NJ. I was moved by being part of a school very different from what I had experienced in Princeton, a school where students struggled with economic issues much more serious than my family ever did. I really enjoyed teaching and decided to go back to school and earn a teaching certificate. At this time, I met my first wife, Maureen, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister whose brother had been a friend in junior high (he was another odd ball, as PKs often are). Maureen and I got married when I was 25 years old. I spent the next seven years earning a Masters and doctorate from Rutgers in 1982, the same year Maureen and I got divorced.
I made a few friends during the years I worked on my doctorate and taught college, but these professional friendships didn’t last. We were too busy competing for grades and jobs, and we didn’t really had time for deep friendships. I made some memorable and very strange friends at a Catholic High School in NJ where I taught for a year, but writing about them would involve a novella, if not a novel. And it would be X-rated!
At Carleton College in Minnesota, where I taught for two years, I made friends with a professor named John Tallmadge who had a passionate love of nature and was very different from the other profs there. He was down-to-earth and deeply spiritual in a way that I resonated with. In 1997 he published a memoir called “Meeting the Tree of Life: A Teacher’s Path.” Reading the blurb for this book reminded me why I valued John’s friendship so much:

Tallmadge was a child of the late sixties with a Yale doctorate in comparative literature under his arm and an empathy for nature in his soul. As a young idealist, he sought the authenticity, power, and possibility of the wilderness by following the intellectual and physical trails blazed by Henry Thoreau and John Muir. His memoir is an attempt to discover another, more private, inner landscape.”  

John wasn’t a Quaker, but he had a Quaker heart and soul. Just after he was let go from Carleton, he wrote a Pendle Hill pamphlet called “Therefore Choose Life: The Spiritual Challenge of the Nuclear Age.” Not only is this a theme I can resonate with, Pendle Hill is the  Quaker study center where I spent a year learning about Quakerism and where I met and courted my wife Kathleen. After leaving Carleton College, John and I went our separate ways, but I still feel a spiritual connection with him. Inspired by writing this reflection, I looked him up on Facebook and found that he is living in Cincinnati. I sent him a friend request and hope he’ll respond. It would be wonderful to connect with him again.

My real and lasting friendships began in 1984 when I discovered the Religious Society of Friends. I was 35 year old. Looking back, I realize that I didn’t know anything about spiritual friendship until this point in my life. My friendships up to then were mainly based on shared interests and emotional affinities. When I became a Quaker, I learned how to be a friend at a deeper level. Over the past 33 years, I’ve come to know hundreds of Quakers in a way that I never knew anyone before. That’s because we’ve shared our lives together, much like what we do in our Brothers on Our Journey gatherings. We gather for worship sharing. We listen to each other’s stories. And we’re committed to each other and to the Religious Society of Friends for the long haul. Even when we have conflicts and drive each other crazy, we still try to stay Friends. Being a Quaker has also helped me to become spiritual friends with people from other faiths. I now feel as if I belong to what Martin Luther King called the “beloved community,” a circle of friends who are deeply committed to each other, to our Divine Creator, and to justice and peace. 

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